Rebecca Pyle

I turned the whole town of Le Havre (“the harbor”) into tin foil; it crumpled so prettily into its dove-tailed corners, its nooks in courtyards where two parent-pigeons guard one dark young pigeon cornered well in its gifted nest, into the spaces beneath the white ascendant bridge, where fishermen could not quite fit themselves well enough in the boat-coved shade. Where children on scooters flew by like beam-borne birds. Tin foil could press itself into the emergent lumps of the statue in honor of de Gaulle and all of France’s historical gall, into the frieze formed by all Carrefour shoppers looking at lemons and whatever else they want, the bottles of wine like lurking genies, dauphins or rivers, which know things now lost, the overhead lights that contain the whorls and spark of sun. Louis the fourteenth, would you mind my photo of myself in Versailles? I am a usurper of your home, but now, so is the whole world. We all come with tourist-trampling in/on our brains; we want to wear your gold slippers and be served food at tables as if we are royalty too. Your tables have gone cold. At night, mosquitoes charge into the windows, coming from the river, the Seine. But they fly in loops like embroiderers or lace-makers whose fingers are old and forgetting what a dream’s purpose is: crumpled tin foil could save someone’s soul. But it cannot save you, the person dreaming of it, tin foil—from death, cannot make perfect what is not—receivable.

Rebecca Pyle is a writer and visual artist. Her work appears in art/literary journals New England Review, LandLocked, Guesthouse, Eclectica, Rock Salt Journal, FOLIO, TINT, Gulf Stream, Watershed Review, Gris-Gris, Brink, Penn Review, Eclectica, Posit, and elsewhere. Her fiction has been nominated for the Best of the Net Award and the Pushcart Prize. Her website is rebeccapyleartist.com. Rebecca is American, but this year, she is living in Europe.